Sunday, August 19, 2012

"The interesting and complex story that runs through the lives of Bruno, Galileo, and their learned contemporaries is not, as Rowland commendably knows, some science-versus-religion showdown still asserted today among historically ignorant scientistic ideologues. But neither is it her repression-versus-liberation dichotomy. It is rather the widespread inability of deeply Aristotelianized contemporaries, simultaneously aghast at the doctrinal, social, and political divisions within Christendom, to grasp the independence of traditional Christian theology from cosmology as such, and thus the compatibility of that theology with different cosmological models. This is evident from the ways in which later Christians have grasped this distinction: the universe's infinite spaces may have terrified Pascal in the mid-17th century, but they did not inhibit his ardent faith and devotion. Nor do they prevent anyone today from accepting all of the Catholic Church's teachings, along with all scientific findings, provided one holds a traditional theology of creation. God is love whether the universe is Ptolemaic or infinite. It turns out that Bruno's moral and theological assertions are entirely independent of the vast universe he posited. And that means that the loss of a geocentric cosmology of nested crystalline spheres was not in any intrinsic way a fundamental break in human self-understanding, whatever its continuing convenience for Western Civ lecturers."

Brad S. Gregory, reviewing Giordano Bruno: philosopher/heretic, by Ingrid D. Rowland, in "Giordano Bruno Superstar," Books and culture: a Christian review 18, no. 2 (March/April 2012): 21 (19-21). The reference to God's being love is a second slap at Rowland's comment that "[i]t would take another four hundred years for a pope to issue an encyclical that began with the words 'Deus caritas est'".